Today I had the good fortune to talk to Gary Gangnes. If you’re not familiar with Mr. Gangnes, he is the guy who is often quoted by the Santa Cruz Sentinel newspaper. He keeps lots of Santa Cruz county real estate market statistics, and is often quoted in various Sentinel articles about the state of the market.
How is it I came to talk to Mr. Gangnes? It’s kind of a long story – I was given his cell phone number by the seller of a house which I was going to put an offer in on for one of my clients. I called the cell number because I wanted to get ahold of the listing agent to let him know I was sending in an offer. However, Gary Gangnes isn’t the listing agent for the seller’s home – somehow, the seller ended up with Gangnes’ card and told me it was his own Realtor’s phone number. To be fair, his Realtor is also named Gary, but works for a different brokerage. Hmmm!
Anyway, I called Gary Gangnes and said I’d be putting in an offer on his listing. He called me back an hour or two later and said, “What listing?” I said, “So-and-so street!” He was confused, because he had no such listing. It was a few moments before we figured out what had happened, that the seller had somehow become confused as to which Gary was actually his Realtor. 🙂
After we figured out what was going on, I said, “Hey Gary – you’re the guy who does those market statistics for the Sentinel, right?” And he said “Right, that’s me!” – or words to that effect. So I thought, while I had him on the line, I’d ask him what his feel of the overall market is. He said: “It’s a solid market.” Basically, he feels that this market is much more of a “normal” market historically speaking, it just seems like a bad market, compared to the period 2000-2005. To his reckoning, home prices are holding fairly steady and sales happening at a decent pace.
It sounds like Gary and I reckon a bit differently on that – the median price is fairly steady, but definitely some segments of the market are dropping, and others continue to appreciate. But if one were to generalize in like a 60 second random phone call about the state of the market, I wouldn’t quibble too much describing it as Gary did.
Find your Place
